Most Western fiction was written by men who had never sat a horse — dime-novelists in New York inventing a frontier of quick draws and noble gunfighters. Andy Adams was the exception. He had ridden the great cattle trails himself, and he wrote the West as it actually was: not a shoot-out but a job — long, dusty, dangerous, and strangely beautiful.
His masterpiece, The Log of a Cowboy, follows a herd from Texas to Montana with such quiet accuracy that historians still use it as a source. There are no villains twirling moustaches, no showdowns at high noon. There is the river crossing where men and cattle drown, the stampede in the dark, the boredom and the comradeship and the sheer physical labour of moving three thousand animals across a continent.
Adams wrote in part out of irritation — he thought the popular Western was a lie, and set out to tell the truth. The result is the closest thing we have to the real voice of the trail-drive era, from a man who was there before the barbed wire went up and closed it forever.
This volume collects his complete Western fiction. Read it against the myth in our essay on the invention of the Western and our guide to the classic Westerns worth reading.
Read The Real West — the complete Andy Adams →
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